Writing, 2016.
Essays since 2006, plus a few things first published at USV. Occasional by design. The podcast lives on its own page.
- Going after it
I’m in SF this week with the USV team – once a year we all come out here together, do a bunch of meetings and social events w our portfolio. Yesterday struck me — and it’s amazing how much of a surprise this is to me, after doing this nearly 5 years — with just… Continue reading
- The new normal
The week before last, my in-laws were hit by a truck while crossing the street after dinner. The time since has been a disorienting whirlwind of sadness, fear, hope and thankfulness. My mother-in-law suffered a very serious brain injury, and while she has cleared the first hurdle of basic survival,...
- Getting out the vote
Yesterday, a fabulous new tool launched — HelloVote: HelloVote makes it easy easy easy to register to vote. Sign up w your phone number and do the whole thing over text. This is great for a lots of reasons — from its immediate practicality, to its more general lesson that it’s possible to build new...
- Alternative Compliance
Summary To better support small businesses operating in regulated sectors, we should develop “alternative compliance” mechanisms — parallel regulatory regimes that achieve the goals of existing regulations but take an alternative, data-oriented approach to achieving them. Such an approach would be ...
- Personal Democracy Forum NYC: Regulating with Data
At this year’s Personal Democracy Forum, the theme was “the tech we need“. One of the areas I’ve been focused on here is the need for “regulatory tech”. In other words, tools & services to help broker the individual / government & corporation / regulator relationship. In a nutshell: we are entering...
- Cable boxes, ridesharing and the right to be represented by a bot
Here are two tech policy issues that don’t seem related but are: the FCC’s current push to open up the set-top-box, and the lawsuits challenging Uber’s and Lyft’s classification of drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. The way to see the connection is through the lens of control ...
- Crypto debate: separating Security from Control
For the past few weeks, I’ve been following the FBI / Apple phone unlocking case, and digging deep into the debate around encryption, security and privacy. This debate is as old as the sun, and the exact same arguments we’re going through now were fought through 20 years ago during the first crypto ...
- The Freedom to Innovate and the Freedom to Investigate
Earlier this week, I was at SXSW for CTA‘s annual Innovation Policy Day. My session, on Labor and the Gig/Sharing Economy, was a lively discussion including Sarah Leberstein from the National Employment Law Project, Michael Hayes from CTA’s policy group (which reps companies from their membership in...
- Internet meets world: rules go boom
Since 2006, I’ve been writing here about cities, the internet, and the ongoing collision between the two. Along the way, I’ve also loved using Tumblr to clip quotes off the web, building on the idea of “the slow hunch” (the title of this blog) and the “open commonplace book” as a tool for tracking t...
- Big innovation and small innovation
Yesterday at one of our bi-monthly team deep dives at USV, we got into the conversation of essentially “Big Innovation” vs. “Small Innovation”. Those who have followed USV for some time know that at the core of the investment thesis is a belief in “decentralized”, “bottom-up” innovation — the kind ...
- Beam should have a hardware API
We’ve got a few Beam telepresence robots at USV, and use them all the time. Fred has written about them here. We had a team meeting today, and we had two beams going at once — Fred and I were the first to arrive, and we were chatting beam-to-beam — he in LAUtah, me in Boston,… Continue reading
- Learning to skate
For the past few winters, I’ve been teaching my kids to ice skate. Above is my son Theo at hockey practice a few weeks ago. At a certain point along the way, I got the bug and realized that skating was awesome and hockey was a beautiful sport. So for the past year or so,… Continue reading
- Zero-rating: putting Net Neutrality to the test
It’s been an intense 10 months since the FCC approved its latest Open Internet rules (aka Net Neutrality). On the wired side, we’ve seen the unbundling of content, as channels such as HBO (via HBO Now) and ESPN (via Sling TV) have split from cable to go “over-the-top” with direct-to consumer offerin...
- Hello, 2016
Breaking the ice — been off the blogs for quite a while now. Looking forward to this year, the way I tend to every year. 2015 was a tough one for me personally — went through a bunch of shit on the family front that both demonstrated how tough life can be and also how… Continue reading